


The Writing's on the Wall

by allthegoodnamesaretakendammit



Series: The Spirit Is Willing [3]
Category: Danny Phantom
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Danny is 18 and a high school senior, Epistolary Romance, Gen, M/M, fun with anagrams
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-17
Updated: 2017-10-17
Packaged: 2019-01-15 21:30:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12329253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allthegoodnamesaretakendammit/pseuds/allthegoodnamesaretakendammit
Summary: When Vlad’s not going all out and actually mails him a normal letter, you know,in the mail, it’s usually to comment on Amity Park’s overabundance of squirrels and how his stocks are doing and say, Daniel, how would you feel about becoming my intern? Danny will tear a page out of his spiral-bound notebook and write him back, talking him down from culling the squirrel population because that would be bad PR and also what did the squirrels ever do to you? And then he’ll say that he doesn’t know what half of those words about stocks mean and no, for the last time, I am not fetching coffee for you.





	The Writing's on the Wall

At the back of Danny’s closet, there is a wall. And exactly one inch inside of that wall, there is a gap between the brick and mortar. And in that gap is a bundle of letters numbering roughly a hundred.

 

It starts like this: the ghost of a speech therapist steals their voices and, as happens more and more often these days, Danny and Vlad “Butter Biscuits” Masters have to team up to take him down. It’s Vlad who fishes a fountain pen out of his pocket and writes on a napkin: _You go high. I’ll go low. Aim for his voice-box._  When the ghost has been roundly punched in the throat and stuffed back into the Ghost Zone, Danny throws the napkin back at Vlad and saunters away before Vlad can peel it off of his face and read the message Danny had written on the reverse side: _u r so bossy._

 

That night, Danny finds a sticky note on his bedroom window that reads: _If by bossy, you mean “behaves as a boss would” and “business-like,” then yes, Daniel. I suppose I am._  Before school the next day, Danny scrawls his reply in Sharpie on a leftover Pringles lid and leaves it on Vlad’s desk in town hall: _yeah, sure. if ur in the business of being a total creep._

 

By bedtime, there is a reply taped to the ceiling, right above the spot where he lays his head down to sleep. _We are ghosts, Daniel. What are we, if not a little creepy?_  Danny’s got to give him one, there. But you wouldn’t know it by the way he writes on the hood of Vlad’s car in liquid chalk marker: _SELF-PROCLAIMED CREEP._

 

It escalates quickly, is what he’s saying. One week they’re writing on a spare napkin and the next, Vlad has strung up one of those birthday-type banners in Danny’s room that reads: _PROUD C+ STUDENT._ When Vlad’s not going all out and actually mails him a normal letter, you know, _in the mail,_ it’s usually to comment on Amity Park’s overabundance of squirrels and how his stocks are doing and say, Daniel, how would you feel about becoming my intern? Danny will tear a page out of his spiral-bound notebook and write him back, talking him down from culling the squirrel population because that would be bad PR and also what did the squirrels ever do to you? And then he’ll say that he doesn’t know what half of those words about stocks mean and no, for the last time, I am not fetching coffee for you.

 

The next letter is written on the mayor’s official stationery, which brings into sharp relief the fine, looping cursive: _Are you certain? I pay my coffee-fetchers quite well._ The man writes with a flourish. It’s the kind of handwriting you’d normally see on a diploma or a wedding invitation. In return, Danny draws him a very crude picture of a stick-figure Danny pushing him into an active volcano. Vlad writes back: _Excellent craftsmanship, Daniel. I shall have to hang it on my fridge._

 

*

 

The third time he wakes up from a dream where he’d been making out with Vlad in the back of his Bentley, Danny has to admit that a pattern is emerging. There are notes scattered throughout the day: a sarcastic letter in his locker, a note helpfully summarizing the War of 1812 stuck between the pages of the history book he has hardly cracked open since the start of spring semester, and a dozen postcards from the Virgin Islands when Vlad goes on vacation. Dreams dotted with red eyes crinkling with laughter in dark corners, a mayoral badge of honor pinned to Danny’s pajamas, or yet another steamy session in the Bentley. That night in March, he is sweating through a dream where he is chased all through the Fenton house by a pack of silver foxes with suspiciously familiar red bows tied around their necks. As a last resort, runs toward his bedroom closet to fold himself safely away in it, but he can’t fit inside because the whole closet is stuffed full of black double-breasted suits and polished leather shoes.

 

Danny surfaces from the dream half an hour before his alarm is set to go off and groggily makes his way over to his desk, grabbing the nearest crinkled-up receipt and penciling in on the back of it: _ever tempted to make a drug that makes u not dream?_

 

When Vlad gets back from the Virgin Islands a day later, bronzed and as smirky as ever, Danny gets his answer. It comes in a literal message in a bottle, one tucked into his backpack when he hadn’t been looking. When he pops the cork and slides out the slip of paper inside, it assures him: _All the time._

 

*

 

It’s not long after that when, in a fit of pique over Vlad’s new zero-tolerance skateboarding policy, Danny steals his red pocket square. It’s on behalf of all the teenagers in Amity Park, really. He borrows his mom’s sewing kit and looks up _stitching for beginners_ on YouTube. He practices on spare scraps of cloth until he gets it perfect, until he can lay bold white letters over the center of the silk square: _BIGGEST JERK IN WISCONSIN._

 

Three days after he returns it to Vlad under the cover of darkness, a three-tiered cake arrives at Danny’s front door, each layer of it pronouncing: _MEANEST - BOY IN - AMITY PARK._ Danny eats the first four letters on the top tier before anybody else can read it. He has to fib to his mom that it had read “sweetest” and that Sam’s mom had sent it because he’d spent all of last weekend helping Sam study for her English test. In truth, he’d spent almost every one of those forty-eight hours fighting a slime monster with Vlad. Which is why he writes, _i saved u from drowning in slime and this is how u thank me? with revenge cake?_ He balls the paper up and hurls it at the back of Vlad’s head when he’s out on lunch-break.

 

 _All’s fair, Daniel,_ is all Vlad writes back. It’s a note tucked underneath the bottom of a handsome new reading lamp sitting on Danny’s desk. He folds the note and turns his hand intangible to add it to the stash in his closet. He wonders if—far away, in a castle in Wisconsin or in the basement laboratory of his apartment downtown—Vlad’s got a stash just like this in his desk.

 

*

 

When Vlad upgrades to a sleek, black Bugatti that looks straight out of another century, Danny can’t help commenting: _srsly? was ur last million dollar car not good enough for u? cldn’t u spend ur money on, i don’t know, literally anything else? starving children? cold fusion???_

 

Maybe it’s because of the dreams, but he’d gotten pretty attached to that Bentley. Apparently, Vlad hadn’t. Danny can tell because his only defense is: _I’ll have you know that I am a world-renowned philanthropist._

 

Danny scrawls on the tiny bit of white space leftover on one of his movie tickets: _yeah yeah whatever u say, moneybags._

 

_I’m not the one who just spent twelve dollars seeing a movie in-theater and, most likely, another eight dollars on popcorn. Money is what you make of it, Daniel._

 

_i think u mean “life’s what u make it.”_

 

_Isn’t that what I just said?_

 

For all that Vlad is a money-obsessed, narcissistic, power-hungry butthole--he _gets_ it. That’s why, a week later, Danny works up the nerve to ask on the back of his fortune cookie paper: _are we immortal?_

 

_If not, then we’re certainly close._

 

_is that a good thing?_

 

_It remains to be seen._

 

 _forever is a very long time,_ Danny agrees. That one he scribbles on a crisp sheet of computer paper, folds it as aerodynamically as he can, and launches the paper airplane through the open window of the mayor’s office.

 

A week later, on a whim, he writes, _i think we can agree that nickels are the best american coin._  The next day, there’s a note tucked into his wallet that reads: _Really, Daniel. Would it kill you to capitalize words properly? Observe here how I’ve capitalized the beginning of each sentence as well as all of the proper nouns._

 

That sleazy, cheese-headed—

 

When Danny cools down enough, he remembers that he hadn't been able to fit the birthday banner in his hiding spot, so it’s just been sitting as a tangled mess in the corner of his room. As any responsible citizen would do, he decides to recycle it. He unclasps the chain of shiny golden letters and rearranges them to say: _DUNCES TURD POT_ _._ He even tapes on an apostrophe after "dunces," since grammatical correctness seems to matter to Vlad so much. Honestly, the banner fits right in with Vlad's bathroom decor.

 

When he gets home from school the next day, he is not disappointed. Strung up outside his bedroom for all to see is the golden word: _RUDE._

 

Vald had thoughtfully stacked the leftover letters on Danny’s desk, which is an invitation and a half. So when Vlad does a sharp dive and a triple loop-de-loop in midair to rescue a small child from a stampede of ghost-horses, Danny knows just how to show his appreciation. Over the windshield of Vlad’s wretched new Bugatti, Danny hangs the shining letters: _DOPE STUNT._  

 

Only an hour later, the headboard of Danny’s bed is crowned: _NOTED._

 

*

 

The last month of high school rolls around and Danny gets to thinking about what’s made him into the man he is today, etc. Loathe as he’d once been to admit it, Vlad had taught him more than anybody. Clash after clash, walking away from each clusterfuck with a new strategy, a new skill… _i don’t think i’d be what i am today, if i hadn’t fought u like every other week._

 

_I concur. I’d be lying, however, if I said I didn’t wonder what you might have become had you truly been under my tutelage._

 

_honestly? me too. but then im like “vlad might have cloned me a zillion times” or “vlad never wld have cloned me at all and there would be no dani.” there’s just no winning any way u slice it._

 

_You really are insightful for your age, Daniel._

 

_and ur pretty sharp for urs, old man._

 

In the empty week of sun between the last day of classes and graduation, the two of them put the beat down on a centaur that really had it coming. Once they’ve shoved him back into the Ghost Zone where he belongs, Danny finally has the space of mind to realize that there is a cut dripping down his cheek. “You’ll want to put antiseptic on that,” Vlad tells him because, underneath it all, he is honestly just a bossy mother hen.

 

“No dice,” Danny tells him as he wipes the blood off with the back of his hand. “I ran out last week.”

 

Vlad sighs as if he has no idea why he’d ever expected otherwise and says, “Come over to mine. I daresay I haven’t run out in the last twenty years.”

 

So they fly over to his place, phasing straight through the walls and into his moonlit office. Vlad pulls a First-Aid kit out from underneath his desk and unlatches it, pointing Danny toward the bathroom next door. Danny rinses his cut with tap water and thinks very hard about his life choices. When it’s stopped bleeding for the most part, Vlad comes in and hands him a bottle of antiseptic cream. He quite literally hovers through the whole process, watching Danny apply the cream and then slap a band-aid over it all.

 

They wander back into the office, and Danny watches as Vlad tucks the antiseptic away and stows the kit back under his desk. “I was wondering…” he says, playing with the whispery paper the band-aid had been sealed in. “Do you keep track of the notes we send each other?”

 

Vlad whirls around and stares at him blankly, like that is the dumbest question he’s ever heard and his brain has to reboot after hearing it. Danny is deeply, deeply embarrassed, rubbing his arm and backtracking, “Oh, okay, I guess not. Sorry, I was just curious--”

 

He’s cut off by the sound of a desk drawer opening loudly, and Vlad beckons him to come see what’s inside. And it’s--it’s a motley collection of receipts and paper airplanes and torn out notebook pages all stamped with Danny’s untidy scrawl. There are so many little scraps of paper, it honestly looks like a drawer full of blandly-colored confetti. Danny leafs through them, almost not daring to hope until he sees it at the very bottom of the pile: a napkin. A carefully folded one with a message written on each side.

 

“I--” Danny rakes a hand through his hair, nearly speechless. “I can’t believe--”

 

“You’re a fool, Daniel,” Vlad sniffs, folding his arms and looking away. “I crave you. If you haven’t noticed, it’s because you’re too preoccupied with thinking that you’re anything less than priceless.”

 

“I, um, you.” Danny briefly turns into a blushing, stuttering mess. “We should. Hang out? Sometime?”

 

Vlad whirls around to look at him again. For about ten seconds, Danny feels like his soul is on display as room fills with moonlight and silence. Then Vlad smiles--a _real_ smile that makes his eyes crinkle as he says, “Why yes, Daniel. That’s a capital idea.”

   

“Sweet,” Danny breathes, a kind of high descending over him. “I’ll show you where I keep your letters.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> I believe the sentence, “Forever is a very long time,” was originally uttered by Winnie the Pooh. 
> 
> Confession: there is some pretty niche Fairly OddParents humor in here if you’re really looking for it. Many, many thanks to my beta freakydeakymoonmagic. You can kinda tell from the name that she's just the best. Also, I'm on the lookout for another beta, so hit me up if you're interested!


End file.
